two weeks and two days!!
ok, ok, I admit it: I am so not back.
I've been scheduling like old Scott, the hundred percenter. no days off, two a day from time to time.
it's so rewarding.
last night, I put all the latest PA (live concert sound) stuff I've been getting and getting done to the test. did sound for The Modniks.
as if the world had not given me enough bounty by having the sixties band I always wanted in The ReJuveniles, with people I love dearly and would take a bullet for, I've somehow also found my way to this totally different sixties band with a John-Paul-George-Ringo like cast of equally loveable and compelling personalities.
bar gigs with them, for basically no money and next to no audience adulation, where I would do sound and wrestle endlessly with nightmarish stuff, ending up exhausted, were still on the short list of things to live for.
it was Bob's idea that The Modniks needed a parks and rec friendly demo, to shop when he was at places representing his other band, The Beloved Invaders, a compelling surf instrumental band with compulsive accuracy and ability. a demo that would show our willingness to wimp up, and play the most accessible stuff.
I put together a basic template for it, and Bob and Sandy tweaked it; I recorded it at my house.
there are oldies bands in Denver. not so many comprised of actual oldies, though. (one, by residence location, a Golden oldie) they are comprised of young people, with better voices and strong mainstream musical talent and good looks. they bravely confront the task of finding the songs to best showcase that musical ability and cranking them out one more time, with professionally generated passion (though, really, that never was their music.)
they don't do "Hang On Sloopy". who in their right minds would do "Hang On Sloopy"??
we do. dammit. and we are flat out tickled on the off chance we play it right and it actually sounds good.
the wimpy parks and rec Modniks, with a sit down acoustic guitar player, is something we all set out to do. but I was a lot of the push behind it.
and part of my idea was...if the band could actually hear themselves, if the audience got something more resembling musicians playing than concert sound, if it was that music in that configuration with that clarity...well, if listeners could resist that, I'd need to check into DeVry university for a new career.
the demo magically got us a dozen gigs this summer. just in time for my voice to go missing.
last night, to me, was the best live sound I've ever heard anywhere.
I'm still working on it. but my goofy cross between audiophile and PA did what I've always wanted it to.
and the audience really really liked it.
I had some restaurant food last night, often a sleep interrupter for me...I celebrated with some sugar free soda that was still plenty sweet. but I think I'm up because I'm excited. two things I have wanted all my life to do got done.
it's like being in a car with your buds and saying, I think I can get us home. turn here, keep going, this next street is it.
if the car trip lasted several years.
when home comes into sight...you feel like you did ok to sign up as the navigator.
I'm wiped.
setting up sound is a campaign. physically and mentally.
and I'm doing sound again tonight.
it's a week back, and three days forward, til I get a day off. I love it all.
but I admit it. I'm wiped. and my voice, which is starting to get some power back, ain't keeping it for long.
neck is better every day. shoulder too. but they hurt.
taste coming back into my mouth slowly. though, as I say, my reputation isn't built very strongly on taste.
all the side effects...dry mouth, sore throat...still there, in succeedingly less virulent versions of themselves.
but, as a patient, I must make this new admission...what I ain't is all the way back.
what I also ain't, though, is in the boat of many many patients you and I both know, who pray daily to be half as lucky as I am and have been. and many who have not the immaculate fortune to have a support system as caring and deep as the gentle readers of this blog.
I feel like, if Einstein had had this group of people sending out a vanguard of will, making an easier path for me through my life like the lead bird in the chevron creating the waves that make it easier to fly along the V shape, he would have lived long enough to finish the Unified Field Theory. (which briefly and inaccurately stated, would have said not only are energy and matter related, but Everything is Everything)
The Beatles hated their concert recordings. they couldn't hear, so they couldn't play to their standards. The Beach Boys struggled throughout their career to show a large group of people what they had done in a studio. CSN sing like no one else, but live they couldn't hear, and couldn't manifest in a stadium what they did in a studio.
concert sound is big. biiiiiiiig. and it features actual bass frequencies, which most people never get to hear.
the size of the bass is how most concert sound guys measure the wonderfulness of their rig. never mind that you can't understand a word being sung. and the volume is a harsh huge transistor radio, and anyone with a $200 stereo gets better sound at home than they get in the $250 a ticket seats.
so...what up with that?
I have theories.
you take a wall mounted loud studio monitor that gives incredibly exacting sound to the best clients in the world, put two thousand of those monitors in a small amphitheatre, and the sound immediately sucks.
what's the difference?
concert sound guys put a high premium on reliability. who wouldn't, in their shoes? if the amps, speakers, mics sound good...hey, that's great...but one that sounds half as good and breaks half as often is going to be better. the "standard of the industry" in concert sound is not the best, the latest, the most accurate, but what people are used to, what has always (never) worked.
the idea that studio guys, hi fi guys, and concert sound guys all have the same goal...to reproduce sound accurately...seems to be my idea alone. mostly those three sects avoid any interaction with each other, like each was the Brahmin and the others untouchable.
but that's not the big reason, in my dreams, that concert sound sucks.
I think the big reason is half a mile of cable.
you have to put the sound guy halfway back in the audience. you haaaaave to.
at Red Rocks...try walking from the mic on the stage to the sound booth. I mean, granted , it's uphill. but you'll be winded. at least, I was.
every mic cable goes all the way out there. all the way across a forty foot stage, then all the way out.
and the mixed sound comes all the way back.
then the amplifiers are onstage...you wouldn't hoist all that weight...and the speakers are, what would you say, thirty feet high?
what if you spend a million dollars on a PA, to preserve the nature of the sound, and connect it up with industry standard sub-Radio Shack cable?
half a mile of it?
when copper forms, it forms in crystals. there are 700 crystals in a foot of copper cable. every time a signal goes from one crystal to another, it is like adding a transistor to the electronics.
(and they form out, in one direction. so every cable sounds a little better when the signal flows in the direction the copper grew, a little worse going against traffic.)
half a mile later, the best board in the world won't do you any good.
now, I am not so all fired convinced that you haaaave to put the sound booth in the middle halfway back. but if there's one place in the venue the sound sounds good, it's right there. it's a good plan to buy tickets right in front of the sound booth.
but what if, in this age of computers, the mixer itself (often digital) were sitting under the middle of the stage, and the computer that tells the mixer what to do were halfway back?
no more half mile of mic cable.
with venues as small as I play, the Red Rocks model doesn't account for much of what we know as shitty small PA sound.
those aren't usually million dollar boards in those systems, or studio monitor speakers, either.
I like my board, my monitor speakers, my antique eq's.
and I face constant pity and contempt for the AudioQuest cables I buy to hook it all together. poor deluded soul. he'll never be a Sound Man. hell, just give me a coupla JBL's, some SM57's, and a Crown amp and I'll be rocking and rolling all night long.
yeah. I've been there. I've heard it.
my main PA cables are silver, instead of copper. they are a meter, some a meter and a half tops. and one crystal of AudioQuest Perfect Surface Silver is 700 feet long.
yes, three feet of cable makes that much difference.
so I feel like my well wishing praying support system network has given me enough extension on my time on earth to have proved out my Unified Field Theory, that concert/ studio/ home stereo sound is really one quest, and that each has something to improve the other.
so I'm excited when I should be sleeping. and wiped. maybe the lone side effect of the Joy Weapon.
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